http://www.newstatesman.com/film/2010/02/pilger-iraq-oscar-american-war
I hate just about anything with Matt Damon in it, so I'm glad JP has given me several good reasons not to see 'Invictus'. I hate American-produced war movies, all all all of them. But I did get to see 'Redacted' on TV here, really really late at night. A remarkable work by DePalma (whom I usually hate). (Not that this has much of anything to do with the Oscars, since a film like 'Redacted' will never get the attention that 'The Hurt Locker' has). The good thing about that overview is that JP has so very little to say about 'Avatar', which is about more than it deserves. A very unremarkable film. Visually stunning in some sequences, I still wonder how they blew 250 million dollars to produce it--the 3D 'Journey to the Center of the Earth' a couple years ago had about as much visually going for it , with a budget of 60 million. Verhoeven's non-3-D but CGI-laden Starship Troopers, produced something like 10 years ago, still shows better integration of CGI for a plot-driven story. The CGI artists haven't really topped it after ten years of trying. The thing they ought to remember about special effects is simply: do the minimum you need to tell the story. The best part of Spielberg's War of the Worlds, for example, is the first 40 minutes before any of the aliens pop up out of the ground. At any rate, here is an excerpt of Pilger: American airbrush Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is in this tradition. A favourite for multiple Oscars, her film is "better than any documentary I've seen on the Iraq war. It's so real it's scary" (Paul Chambers, CNN). Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian reckons it has "unpretentious clarity" and is "about the long and painful endgame in Iraq", and that it "says more about the agony and wrong and tragedy of war than all those earnest well-meaning movies". What nonsense. This film offers a vicarious thrill through yet another standard-issue psychopath, high on violence in somebody else's country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion. The hype around Bigelow is that she may be the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director. How insulting that a woman is celebrated for a typically violent all-male war movie. The accolades echo those for The Deer Hunter (1978), which critics acclaimed as "the film that could purge a nation's guilt"! The Deer Hunter lauded those who had caused the deaths of more than three million Vietnamese, while reducing those who resisted to barbaric commie stick figures. In 2001, Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down provided a similar, if less subtle, catharsis for another "noble failure" by the US, this time in Somalia, airbrushing the heroes' massacre of up to 10,000 Somalis. By contrast, the fate of an admirable American war film, Redacted, is instructive. Made in 2007 by Brian De Palma, the film is based on the true story of the gang rape of an Iraqi teenager and the murder of her family by US soldiers. There is no heroism, no purgative. The murderers are murderers, and De Palma ingeniously describes the complicity of Hollywood and the media in the epic crime of Iraq. The film ends with a series of photographs of Iraqi civilians who were killed. When it was ordered that their faces be blacked out "for legal reasons", De Palma said: "I think that's terrible because now we have not even given the dignity of faces to this suffering people. The great irony about Redacted is that it was redacted." After a limited release in the US, the film all but vanished. Non-American (or non-western) humanity is not deemed to have box-office appeal, dead or alive. They are the "other" who are allowed, at best, to be saved by "us". In Avatar, James Cameron's vast and violent money-printer, 3-D noble savages known as the Na'vi need a good-guy American soldier, Sergeant Jake Sully, to save them. This confirms they are "good". Natch. My Oscar for the worst of this year's nominees goes to Invictus, Clint Eastwood's unctuous insult to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Based on a hagiography of Mandela by a British journalist, John Carlin, the film might have been a product of apartheid propaganda. In promoting the racist, thuggish rugby culture as a panacea of the "rainbow nation", Eastwood gives barely a hint that many black South Africans were deeply embarrassed and hurt by Mandela's embrace of the hated springbok symbol of their suffering. He airbrushes white violence - but not black violence, which is ever present as a threat. As for the Boer racists, they have hearts of gold, because they "didn't really know". The subliminal theme is all too familiar: colonialism deserves forgiveness and accommodation, never justice. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
